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Phage
'' |image= |series= |production=105 |producer(s)= |story= Timothy DeHaas |script= Skye Dent and Brannon Braga |director= Winrich Kolbe |imdbref=tt0708946 |guests=Cully Fredricksen as Dereth, Stephen Rappaport as Motura, Martha Hackett as Seska |previous_production=Time and Again |next_production=The Cloud |episode=VOY S01E05 |airdate=6 February 1995 |previous_release=(VGR) Time and Again (Overall) Life Support |next_release=(VGR) The Cloud (Overall) Heart of Stone |story_date(s)=48532.4 (2371) |previous_story=(VGR) Time and Again (Overall) Life Support |next_story=(VGR) The Cloud (Overall) Heart of Stone }} Summary During an Away Team survey of a planetoid that seems to be rich in raw dilithium, Neelix is attacked and left for dead. The other members of the team find him and beam him up to Sickbay, where the Doctor reports that the Talaxian's lungs have been removed. With no other alternatives, the Doctor fits Neelix with a set of holographic lungs. They'll keep him alive, but require him to remain confined in an isotropic restraint in Sickbay for the rest of his life. Janeway leads an Away Team back to the planetoid, where they discover a medical lab filled with harvested organs. Unfortunately, Neelix's lungs are not among them. Minutes later, an alien ship speeds away from the planet, with Voyager hot in pursuit. In Sickbay, a despondent Neelix is having difficulty adjusting to his situation, but he urges Kes to still go on with her life regardless. Voyager's Emergency Medical Hologram, still serving as the starship's only doctor, admits to Kes that he's having difficulty adjusting to the demands of being a full-time physician. Kes' intelligent, soothing advice makes the Doctor think that the Ocampan might make a good medical assistant. When confronted, the aliens admit that they stole Neelix's lungs, but defend their actions by recounting the battle that their species — the Vidiians — have fought for years against the "Phage," a gruesome disease that destroys their genetic codes and cellular structure. Unable to defeat the Phage, they have learned to survive by scavenging organs from healthier species to replace their own diseased tissues. Unfortunately, Neelix's lungs have already been transplanted into one of the Vidiian's bodies. Unwilling to sentence the Vidiian to death to regain Neelix's chance for life, Janeway reluctantly releases the scavengers. Grateful to the Captain for sparing them, the Vidiians offer to help Neelix with their superior medical technology. With their assistance, Kes is able to donate one of her lungs to Neelix, allowing him to live a normal life. After the successful procedure, the Doctor tells Kes that Janeway has granted permission for the Ocampan to begin training as a medical assistant. Errors and Explanations Nit Central # Cableface on Thursday, December 17, 1998 - 12:46 pm: Okay, big one boys and girls. When the Doctor proposes the holographic lungs, Paris complains that they're just holograms and the doctor slaps him. He diddles with some controls and tells Paris to punch him back. The punch goes straight through the doc. Now, he presses some buttons to make himself solid again. But if he wasn't solid , how could he press the buttons? You could say that he is a part of sickbay and he could work the systems himself. But if this is so, why did he need to press the buttons in the first place? Rebekah Bunch on Thursday, December 17, 1998 - 1:45 pm: This issue is discussed in Revulsion as well. I'd just always assumed the Doctor could voluntarily control what parts were solid and what were not. He would have to be solid to handle instruments and unsolid to stroll through those forcefields in Sickbay. (Which still doesn't explain why he has to press buttons on a console) If the idea of the forcefields is to contain infection (as well as to confine your more disturbed patients) then those fields shouldn't be permeable to ANYTHING...so what happens to his mobile emitter when he goes through? Seniram 12:45, December 2, 2017 (UTC) Nothing, because he doesn’t need it when in Sickbay. Besides, the holographic systems could produce holographic copies of any other items he needs, such as mini scanners and the like. # The away team start the transport crouching beside Neelix on the ground but end it with Neelix on the bed and them standing beside him. This could be an experimental setting, to prevent further damage to the patient when being lifted onto the biobed. # Keith Alan Morgan on Saturday, April 24, 1999 - 7:53 am: When talking about the Galley, Neelix says, "I had to completely re-route the mess hall power conduits." If Voyager already had a Mess Hall then why did Neelix need to turn the Captain's Private Dining Room into a Galley? Richie Vest on Saturday, April 24, 1999 - 2:39 pm: Yes they did have a mess hall - you see it in the pilot. What Neelix did was take out the Repilicators in the mess hall and behind there is the Captain's Private Dining Room which Neelix turned into the cooking area.Seniram 12:45, December 2, 2017 (UTC) He needed the space for the cooking equipment and food storage. # The Doctor realizes he can create a pair of holographic lungs for Neelix and to do this he downloads Neelix's last transporter trace. One small problem, the last time Neelix used the transporter was after he had had his lungs removed. Oooops. Better use the next to last transporter trace, Doc. There could be a standard transporter trace in Neelix's ship based records. # John A. Lang on Tuesday, May 18, 2004 - 7:51 am: Why couldn't the EMH CLONE another lung from Neelix's DNA? Brian Fitzgerald on Tuesday, May 18, 2004 - 9:55 am: Could be that starfleet stopped all R&D on that stuff because of the ban on genetic engineering.constanze on Wednesday, May 19, 2004 - 1:53 am: I can't follow that: growing organs as replacement for injured adult people is therapy. Genetic engineering means altering the genome of an embryo before planting the embryo (or rather, fertilized egg) inside the mother to develop. Different procedure, which is much more open to misuse from the start. (It can be used to eliminate genetic disease, but where does it stop - with shortsightedness? Inferior muscle/ immune system?) Alternatively, genetic engineering could be done with retro-viruses: inserting small parts of healthy DNA into a sick adult person to cure the worst froms of genetic disease. This technique is much more risky than changing around the DNA of an egg, and since its done with an adult, already-formed body, mostly useful for the curing of diseases, not for enhancing abilities beyond normal measures. Thande the geneticist on Wednesday, May 19, 2004 - 2:27 am: Constanze, you make some good points, but the thing to realise is that what people decide is not necessarily based on scientific classification. Take the current GM debate: there is a sizeable segment of the population that objects to any kind of GM, even though there are several different types that one would think would be approached differently (plants engineered to produce pharmaceutical drugs, crops just designed to make bigger yields, crops engineered to grow in poorer soil i.e. for 3rd world countries, etc.). Some scientists even attempted recently to get around public opposition to GM by engineering the gene they wanted in a crop and then working out how to get that gene in the crop just by doing normal selective breeding. But of course the public won't listen, because most of the opposition to GM is irrational (I say most, because there are some real safety issues which have to be dealt with). So if there was a huge Eugenics War with genetically engineered supermen trying to take over the world, I think there would be total opposition to anything that even went near genetic engineering. # Francois Lacombe (Franc0is) on Tuesday, July 30, 2013 - 6:23 am: The Vidiian doctor scans Neelix in sick bay and declares his holographic lungs to be primitive and barely sufficient to keep him alive. He then scans the people present in sick bay to ascertain their health and suitability to be organ donors. When he points his scanner at the Doctor, it makes a bizarre beeping noise and the puzzled Vidiian says that according to the scanner, the Doctor is not even there, to which the Doctor replies that he wished he wasn't. But the Doctor is a hologram, just like Neelix's lungs which the Vidiian scanner was perfectly able to identify and examine. It's a cute bit of dialogue but it makes no sense in the context. The scanner should simply have reported that the Doctor is a hologram. Keith Alan Morgan (Kmorgan) on Wednesday, July 31, 2013 - 4:38 am: Maybe his scanner simply detected the evidence that something like lungs were working (oxygen/carbon dioxide exchange, etc.), but didn't actually pick up the hologram itself? # Francois Lacombe (Franc0is) on Wednesday, July 31, 2013 - 11:10 am: Why did the Vidiians stop at harvesting Neelix's lungs. Sure, they urgently needed the lungs, but taking them from Neelix would have killed him anyway, so why not take all his organs for future needs while they had the opportunity? The other organs may not have been so easily compatible with Vidiian phsyiology . # Francois Lacombe (Franc0is) on Monday, September 12, 2016 - 3:45 pm: During the episode's opening, we are shown the kitchen Neelix set up in the captain's private dinning room. It is filled with smoke and has many open flames in the cooking area. Why aren't every fire alarm in that room screaming bloody murder at that point? Neelix must have disconnected them during the conversion work, and neglected to reconnect them when he had finished. Notes Category:Episodes Category:Voyager